Revisiting Catholicism in Asia

March 22, 2013 By 1 Comment

In a recent post I shared some of the recent statistics reported by the New York Times regarding the change in the Catholic population around the world. Through the friendly comments I received from Dr. Conrad Hackett of the Pew Research Center and a couple other sociologists, I learned that Pew has their own statistics on the global Catholic population. This got to me as I discovered that the numbers I used to create my graphs were largely taken from the New York Times article, which I learned do not rely on the Pew numbers. So how different are they and what does that tell us?

By sheer population size Filipinos dominate, and the NYT and Pew numbers confirm this even though they vary by up to 4 million. The rates for Japanese and Vietnamese Catholics is also fairly similar. The big differences where the NYT shows the higher estimate are China (15 million vs. 9 million from the Pew data), and India (19 million vs. 10.6 million). Pew estimates a higher percentage of Korean Catholics (5 million vs. 1.4 million from the NYT data). What this suggests then is that using the Pew data, Korean and Vietnamese Catholic populations are essentially equal in size whereas the NYT data suggests that Korean Catholics are the smaller sibling to their Vietnamese brethren. And if the nationality of an Asian Pope were chosen based on population, the Pew data suggests that (besides the Philippines of course) it would be a toss-up between China and India, followed by a toss-up between Korea and Vietnam. Based on the NYT data, the Asian Pope would likely originate from the Philippines, followed by India, then China, Vietnam, Korea and Japan.

While knowing the raw estimates is interesting, the reference point for those estimates illuminates different impressions. What do we learn when we take the estimates of the Catholic population in each nation relative to that nation’s overall population. In other words, how Catholic are some of these countries in Asian? As a percentage of Catholics per nation, clearly Filipinos dominate as usual, no surprises there. The big difference is between Vietnam and South Korea: based on the NYT data, Vietnam has the higher percentage of its population Catholic at 6%. This is slightly lower than the Pew estimate. But Pew’s figure for Korean Catholics is way higher than the NYT figures (11% vs. 3% of the population) and thus takes the (distant) second place position. To learn more about the proportion of Catholics in different Asian countries, go to this link to a cool interactive map of Christianity in Asia.

Finally, rather than calculating the percentage of Catholics in a nation, the raw estimate of the population of Catholics can be used to compare it with all Catholics in the Asia Pacific region. I illustrated this using the NYT data in the previous post, and I now show it side-by-side with the Pew version. I thought this was interesting to observe because the number of Catholics per nation tells us different things based on our reference point. The 76 million Filipino Catholics (according to the Pew data) make up 81% of all Filipinos, but only 58% of all Asian Catholics. It’s still clearly the lion’s share and it’s particularly notable given that when we’re talking about all Catholics in Asia, we’re including millions of believers from China and India. Despite being a much less populous nation than these two giants, Filipino Catholics are still the majority. The Filipino percentage of Asian Catholics is a bit smaller using the NYT data, at 53%. The rank ordering is pretty much the same for China, India, and Japan’s Catholics (second, third and sixth place respectively). The difference between the two figures shows up most for the Korean and Vietnamese Catholics. Pew again suggests that the share of all Asian Catholics that are from these two countries is about the same (4% for Korea and 4.3% for Vietnam), while the NYT data places Vietnamese Catholics as clearly a larger presence among Asian Catholics (6% vs. 3% for Korean Catholics).

While the big picture hasn’t changed, new sources of data allow us to get a fuller picture of the growing presence of Catholicism in Asia. The quality difference in that data might shift the picture to some degree, but given the fairly close approximations on most of the figures from the NYT and Pew, these appear to be relatively reliable. The consistency of Pew’s track record in getting the best data (oftentimes collecting it themselves which is no small feat) has me leaning more in favor of their sources rather than the NYT. Other observations welcome!

 

Filed Under: Jerry Park Tagged With: , , 1 Comment

What, exactly, is Evangelical Christianity?

March 21, 2013 By 12 Comments

(Part 1 in a series on Evangelical Christianity in America)

There is much confusion about Evangelical Christianity in America, including very basic questions such as: What is it? Who are Evangelical Christians? What do they believe? How is it changing? And so forth.

So, I thought that I would start a series, guaranteed to run as long as I feel like writing about it, that simply describes the basics of Evangelical Christianity in modern-day America.

Let’s start with perhaps the most basic of questions: What is Evangelical Christianity?

There is no one answer to even this the most simple of questions, though there are fundamental characteristics associated with it.

Historian David Bebbington defines Evangelical Christianity as having four main qualities (quoted from here):
* Biblicism, a particular regard for the Bible (e.g. all essential spiritual truth is to be found in its pages)
* Crucicentrism, a focus on the atoning work of Christ on the cross
* Conversionism, the belief that human beings need to be converted
* Activism, the belief that the gospel needs to be expressed in effort

Theologian John Stackhouse has a nice discussion of the theological aspects of the term here.

Sociologist Brian Steensland and colleagues point to these characteristics: ”Evangelical denominations have typically sought more separation from the broader culture, emphasized missionary activity and individual conversion, and taught strict adherence to particular religious doctrines.”

As commonly used, Evangelical Christianity refers to Protestants only, and I will follow that convention, though there’s no reason that the general definition of Evangelicalism can’t apply to Catholics as well. In fact, Pope Francis has been labeled an “Evangelical Catholic.”

Here is where things get tricky: How do we measure Evangelical Christianity? That is, how do we know who is one and who isn’t one?

The most commonly-used approach is scholarly research is to look at religious affiliation and define Evangelical Christianity at a denominational level. So, people who go to “Evangelical” Protestant denominations are themselves Evangelicals. But… there are different approaches to doing this.

One affiliation-based approach, developed by Steensland et al., divides Protestants into three traditions: Evangelical, Mainline, and Historically Black. Evangelicals tend to be more conservative both socially and theologically, Mainline tend to be more liberal on both, and Historically Black tend to be theologically conservative and socially liberal.

A second popular affiliation-based approach, however, refers to “conservative” protestants and contrasts them with “moderate” and “liberal” protestants. Conservative protestants and then broken into different groups, including evangelicals, fundamentalists, and charismatics.

The term “conservative protestant” in the second approach is roughly equivalent to “evangelical” in the first approach.

Which is the better approach? I tend to use the first approach since its measurement characteristics are reasonably well supported in empirical studies; however, both approaches have their problems. With the first approach, many of the people defined as Evangelical don’t identify with that term themselves (a point I’ll return to below). With the second approach, many conservative protestants are conservative in theology but liberal in politics and social issues, so painting them with the broad brush of conservatism overstates matters.

To complicate matters further, journalists and other people in public discourse (and even some scholars) use a variety of terms as synonymous with evangelical/conservative protestant, including “fundamentalist,” “born-again,” and “religious right.” Others, however, give each of these terms more precise meaning.

As a second general approach, some scholars focus on identity. To them, Evangelical Christians are people who say they are Evangelical Christians.

With other religious traditions, affiliation and identity measures yield about the same results. For example, people in the Catholic church usually think of themselves as Catholics. However, as discussed above, many people involved in Evangelical churches identify with other labels, such as “born-again Christian” or “non-denominational Christian.”

Conceptually, identity and affiliation are two different matters. For example, I live in New England (Connecticut’s state motto: “We’re between New York and Boston), but I don’t identify myself as a New Englander–still a Californian. So, at some level, whether we look at identity or affiliation depends on which aspect of the religious experience we’re interested in.

As a third general approach, a well-known marketing firm–The Barna Group–uses theological questions to identify Evangelical Christians. They start with two theology questions to identify born-again Christians. Then, among born-again Christians, they use seven more theology questions to identify Evangelical Christians.  For example, one of the seven questions regards “believing that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on earth.”

I don’t know of any scholars who use this 9-question theology test to define evangelicals, and it strikes me as convoluted and of unknown measurement qualities.

The different uses of the term Evangelical lead to all sorts of confusion. For example, using affiliation-based definition, about 25% of Americans are Evangelical Christians. But, using identity- or theology-based definitions, the number drops to 8%-15%.

What does all of this mean for the person wanting to learn about Evangelical Christianity? Basically, in reading any information about Evangelical Christianity, you, the reader, have to first assess how the author is using the term. It means more work for you, but it’s necessary for understanding what’s going on.

Enough confusing terminology! My upcoming posts will have cool graphs and numbers that demonstrate how Evangelical Christianity (as defined in the first affiliation-based approach) is doing.

(P.S., we bloggers are told that we need to add pictures to enhance our posts. But, I have no idea of how to visually illustrate an operational definition, so I just added a picture of a cute kitten).

Filed Under: Brad Wright Tagged With: 12 Comments

Is Tocqueville Still Relevant?

March 20, 2013 By 5 Comments

It is with a bit of trepidation that I begin discussing with my students in positive sociology this week Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Is a work written in the 1830s relevant nearly 200 years later? When I assign readings from 1985 my students say, “Gee, this is old and out of context,” so how will they respond to a book from 1835? Will they dismiss Tocqueville’s insights or writing style as irrelevant to their everyday concerns and the concerns of our nation?

As the book’s title suggests, Tocqueville ventured to the U.S. from France to find out: what makes American democracy work? The 600-page volume he produced is quite likely still the best assessment of American culture that has ever been written. In this masterpiece that has now become a foundational piece for cultural literacy, Tocqueville writes as a foreigner (he was a Frenchman) and to foreigners (his book was originally published in French for a French audience) about what cultural and social forms distinctly American, and how those distinct American social and cultural traits uphold the great American experiment in democracy.

Today, most Americans take our democracy for granted and hardly realizing, as my graduate school instructor from Princeton University Paul Starr put it, what a bunch of radicals the American revolutionaries were and how most of the world at the time flat-out rejected the idea that the masses were deserving of liberty or capable of self-rule. Today, the word democracy gets thrown around in our domestic policy debates and most certain in our foreign policy debates.

As I chatted with Beau Weston, the Van Winkle Professor of Sociology and Centre College (Kentucky), we talked about how Tocqueville was trying to persuade French aristocrats that democracy can really work. Liberty, many European aristocrats at the time thought, could only be entrusted to the educated, the landed, well, to other aristocrats like them who had been given their liberty and their superior social position by their God. Aristocrats believed that society had to be organized top down, with the church, kings and aristocrats exercising special rights and abilities to make society cohere. The needs or rights of individuals didn’t matter too much; the masses needed order, not liberty, to thrive.

At around the same time as the American Revolution, the Scottish moral philosopher (who is better remembered as an economist) Adam Smith wrote two extraordinarily influential works: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776). The noted economic history Jacob Viner points out how in these two works Smith argues that humans are all endowed with natural liberty, and that such natural liberty gives rise to social order (Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 35, No. 2, April 1927, pp. 198-232).

It’s overly simplistic to say that Smith wrote that the pursuit of self-interest produces the common good; Smith saw very clearly the dangers of self-deceit and corruption. But Smith’s enduring insight was that that social order can arise from the free cooperation of individuals, that competition in the economic realm could lead to cooperation. This ideal of upholding natural liberty as a path to social cooperation is deeply embedded in American culture, history and institutions.

Tocqueville set out to demonstrate to Frenchmen that political liberty could really work, that you can make a great nation out of people who are pursuing their self-interest. Hence, I assigned sections of Tocqueville to my students in order to get them to reflect on questions such as: How do we develop a society that finds a working balance between self interest and group interest?  How do we get people to care about the common good beyond their own self-interest or even their own group interest? How do we get group competition to be good for the common good rather than bad for the common good?

Robert Bellah

Thus far in my positive sociology class, we have discussed the many useful insights from positive psychology. But, as Martin Seligman admitted when I met him, positive psychology remains profoundly individualistic. We have also read Jonathan Haidt’s important book The Righteous Mind. As Robert Bellah and I discussed last week, the narrative of American individualism is so deeply ingrained that it’s hard to get students to see themselves as shaped by collectivities and to see that their actions contribute (or detract from) collective goods. Haidt’s beautiful writing, poignant examples and mass of empirical evidence convince students that society is both made of up people who are fiercely self-interested and groups that are just as fiercely loyal, cohesive and competitive.

Haidt leaves us off, however, with a weak vision of the common good. As noted Stanford moral psychologist William Damon points out in his review of The Righteous Mind, Haidt largely concludes his work by calling for tolerance among competing moral matrices. But he fails to explain, according to Damon, why tolerance should be a universal moral standard or how tolerance will get us to desired outcomes.

Damon writes:

“Except for short-lived interludes during periods of national consensus, American politics typically has been fiercely partisan. The genius of our democracy has been its capacity to regain a sense of solidarity, even reconciliation, after a resolution of divisive contentions among interest groups with opposing views. The struggles have not always been harmless, and they are almost always unpleasant to live through. But who is to say that noisy struggles have not been needed for steering the nation on the right course over the long haul? Sometimes a nation’s citizens must take oppositional stands in pursuit of a better way.”

Robert Bellah also insisted to me last week that contesting moral claims made by our leaders is a central purpose of living in a democracy. I never appreciated the freedoms we have in the U.S. until I spent long amounts of time in my mother’s homeland of Cuba, which has been communist for more than 50 years. Seeing people trapped under totalitarianism in Cuba, I learned a hard lesson about the U.S.: we are either active creators of our social and political systems, or we become passive takers of liberty and prosperity that so much of the world would give anything just to taste. People risk their lives to come to the U.S. on rickety boats from Cuba and through the dangerous deserts of the Rio Grande to seek freedom and prosperity.

Today, American democracy needs to not just assert but to demonstrate its superiority to other political systems, such as theocracy in Iran, military dictatorships in Africa, and limited democracies in much of East Asia. I worry that many of our students are taught to criticize our system rather than both criticize and praise it. Please note: I am not saying students should not criticize American political and social systems, but I am saying that criticism without some view of a positive solutions is of limited use. We must know our nation’s strengths if we want to engage in the type of informed criticism and civil contestation that eminent scholars like Robert Bellah or William Damon are calling for.

I’m hoping that my students embrace Tocqueville as a way to analyze their own experiments in pursuing self-interest and collective goods on the university campus. If college is just about credentials or knowledge, why do American universities relentlessly encourage group activities like sports, theater, newspapers, debate clubs, and dorm associations. Why are intramural sports at UNC, Princeton or Yale so competitive, so conducive to bonding and so much fun (even if the athleticism leaves much to be desired)?

With regards to religion, today’s generation has been called a generation of seekers. They are willing to try on new religious communities like trying on new shoes. Loyalty to one’s religious denomination has never been as low as it is today in the U.S. But I dare say that this generation is a generation of seekers not just in religion but also in groups more generally.

Today’s college generation is not just seeking for groups, they are groping for groups. As one of my freshmen said, “Gee, positive psychology tells me that my life will be meaningful if I have a purpose in life, but how do I find purpose on my own? I don’t belong to any religious tradition, I don’t really believe strongly in anything, and I don’t belong to any groups on campus. I feel lost, like I’m just following some roles with no purpose. I would love to just follow a group. I don’t want to have to  figure out the meaning of my life all on my own.”

Today’s obsession with competitive college sports is clearly a sign of group seeking. As one of my students discovered when she attended a basketball game in her hometown of Miami, some people call themselves “bandwagon fans” and show up painted in the colors and symbols of whatever college basketball team is on a currently winning all its games. The University of Miami has had an unusually strong season in 2013, so the game she attended was full of these bandwagon fans that have no ties to the city of Miami nor to the University of Miami. They simply want to associate with a winning team and participate most actively in all the rituals that comprise college basketball.

One of the main things I hope my students get out of Tocqueville is an ability to see their group seeking as a fundamental tendency of human nature, and when channeled properly, that group participation–even fierce loyalties to groups and inter-group competition–is one of the features that makes American democracy work. If Tocqueville can convince students that self-interest and group interest can build towards the common good, the next question then becomes: under what conditions do self-interest and group interest contribute to the common good rather than becoming destructive?  This is the question Tocqueville set out to answer, and a question we must be ready to take up again today.

Filed Under: Margarita Mooney Tagged With: , 5 Comments

Video Madness

March 16, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Normally I do not use my blog to send readers to another blog, but I am preparing to do a series on atheists and I am not yet ready to begin it. This blog by Hoffmeister substantiates an argument I made a while ago about needing a holistic solution to gun violence. Forget the business about the Huffington Post and look at his discussion of video games. With so much concentration on gun control I fear that we are forgetting about video games which I believe to be a greater source of the gun violence problem. Please enjoy this blog and come back in April for the start of my series on atheists.

http://peterbrownhoffmeister.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/on-school-shooters-the-huffington-post-doesnt-want-you-to-read-this/.

Filed Under: George Yancey Leave a Comment

Asian and Asian American Catholicism

March 15, 2013 By 5 Comments

It’s no surprise that part of my interest in sociology is autobiographical, and this week’s selection of a new pope brought me back to some of my own history with the Catholic Church. One of my most recent cultural encounters with Catholicism was at my father’s funeral. While he was not a religious person for most of his life (according to his friend) the last decade or so included weekly attendance at St. Basil’s with one of his siblings and his family.   

St. Basil’s is one of the main Catholic churches for Los Angelenos and is well-positioned for walking from Koreatown. During my two days there, I witnessed specific Korean prayers and even modes of prayer that I had not seen in my years growing up in mixed-ethnic Catholic churches in New Jersey and Philadelphia. Three years later, I’m reminded of how significant Catholicism is for many Korean immigrants and many Koreans.

The Korean Catholic population as with many Asian Catholics is quite large but not nearly as large as that of Latin America and Europe. According to this infographic from the New York Times, 483 million of the world’s Catholics are Latin American (from Mexico, Central America, South America and the Caribbean) constituting a 41% share of the world’s Catholic population. There are more Catholics in Latin America than there are people in the United States. Europe has a 24% share and no other continent is larger than 15% share from there. It’s sensible then that the first non-European pope would come from Latin America. And it’s perhaps shrewd decision-making that the Argentinian pope is the child of Italian immigrants. Interestingly, if you take the figures from the NYT for the specific nations with Catholic populations exceeding 10 million, Brazil is the giant. At 150 million Catholics, they take up 31% of all Catholics in Latin America and 13% of all Catholics in the world. No other nation has a 6% share of the world population (the US and the Philippines hold this distinction).

Given my interest in Asian America, I immediately wanted to know more about the Asian scene of Catholicism and its possible relevance to US Asian Catholics. I didn’t have time to find every Catholic figure for the same year in every Asian country, so I focused only on the top 6 countries that have been sending immigrants to the US since 1965: China, India, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam. This is a graph I made of the Catholic distribution across these nations, with an additional placeholder for all other Asian Catholics that are not from the aforementioned nations:

 

The main 6 countries add up to more than 2.8 billion people in 2010 including the two most populous countries, China and India. Given their size even the small percentage that claim to be Catholic is quite large with 15 million in China (1.2% of the population) and 19 million (1.6%) in India. To put this in perspective, there are about as many Catholics in China compared to Canada, and more than in Angola, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Tanzania, and Uganda. From a US perspective there are only 3 states with populations that are larger than the Catholic populations of China and India: California, New York, Texas. Of the remaining Asian nations, the Catholic giant in Asia is the Philippines at 72 million and this constitutes about 78% of that nation’s population, and 53% of all Asian Catholics. Vietnam and Korea have a 6 and 3 percent share of Catholics in their nations respectively and slightly more than 500,000 Catholics reside in Japan (a 0.4% share of all Asian Catholics). Here are two images, one is a photo I took while traveling in Seoul of a Korean Mary and Jesus, and the other is a Vietnamese Mary and Jesus.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When we turn to the American scene, Pew’s recent survey of Asian Americans provides some new estimates on the population of Catholics. These estimates are conservative as they reflect the largest six groups in the US who together form about 85% of all Asian Americans. Of  the 15 million Asian Americans in these groups, about 3.4 million identify as Catholic, or about 22% of all Asian Americans. This is slightly higher than the Pew number since we’re only looking at the largest six groups. Unlike their counterparts in Asia, the size of different Asian American Catholics varies considerably. Filipino American Catholics clearly dominate Asian American Catholicism at 65%. But Vietnamese American Catholics take up a 15% share of Asian American Catholics making them the second largest in the US (while their counterparts overseas are ranked #4). Chinese American Catholics mirror their peers in People’s Republic at rank 3 while Koreans climb up to 4th place, or 5% of Catholic Asian America. Indian Catholics retreat to 5th place compared to their counterparts in India at 2nd place. Japanese American Catholics numbering at less than 53,000 is similar to their counterparts in the last position among the top six groups.

 

Encountering Asian American Catholics is somewhat of a rarity given these figures, and their practices vary based on the heritage they retain from the countries that many of the immigrants bring with them. Whether it is transmitted effectively to the next generation remains to be seen. One of the practices that interests sociologists is that of civic engagement. To what extent are Asian American Catholics participating in American civil society and within ethnic or Catholic communities? A few studies have emerged on the remittances sent by Filipino Catholics, as well as the larger scope of Asian American Catholic voluntarism relative to other religious groups (a couple of these were studies conducted by me and sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund). These studies suggest that Asian American Catholics are similarly active in civic activities whether religious or secular, and in some instances financial support across the Pacific flows through religious networks. Ties between Catholic and non-Catholic local communities as well as transnational ties between US and non-US Catholic communities continue a pattern we have seen historically in the American Catholic experience. While travel and communication technology have allowed many of these ties to be stronger or more efficient, the ethos remains the same. The difference appears to be the source of Catholic migration which is much more Latin American and steadily Asian as well.

Edit 3/18/13: figures taken largely from New York Times and Pew Research Center surveys

Edit 3/20/13: Readers should note that these figures do not indicate the proportion of Catholics per Asian nation or Asian American ethnic group; they reflect fractions of the total population of Catholics in Asia or Asian America. For example, 53% of all Catholics in Asia are from the Philippines.

In editing the pie graphs I discovered some important discrepancies in the numbers reported by the New York Times and the Pew Research Centers. Stay tuned for a post that reveals differences in the portrait of Catholic diversity based on different sets of data.

Filed Under: Jerry Park Tagged With: , , 5 Comments